Social media gives us the ability to choose what we share on our online profiles, and therefore manipulate the content to show the ‘best’ image of ourselves. I might occasionally post a selfie on Instagram which would appear to be a quick and easy action, just take one photo and press upload right? Wrong. But what you don’t see is the collection of photos that have accumulated on my camera roll after taking several attempts to capture the perfect angle.
So this got me thinking… Why do I feel the need to post selfies? What am I trying to prove and who am I trying to prove it to? Questions that I am yet to find the answer to.
Many social media users seek fulfilment from receiving likes and positive comments on the posts that they upload. Of course this is understandable, who isn’t going to feel good after receiving 50+ likes on a photo? But this obsession with posting the perfect life is beginning to take over peoples ability to actually live their lives and appreciate the experiences that are put before them.
I often find myself out for dinner with friends/family and instantly reaching for my phone to take a photo of the food in-front of me, sometimes taking several minutes to find the best angle and posting it to my Snapchat story. It is easy to become trapped in a self-absorbed bubble, and constantly snap away at every moment in life – because if you didn’t take a photo of it, did it even happen?
Writing this blog post has made me reflect on what content I post on my social media sites. As cheesy as it may sound, it has prompted me to start ‘living for the moment’. I have countless videos saved to my camera roll from various music festivals that I have attended over the past few years (with some being uploaded to my Instagram/Facebook), but I can’t honestly say that I have ever watched them back. Although understandably we like to take photos/videos as a means of holding on to a visual reminder of certain events, sometimes it will mean more to put our phones in our pockets for a few minutes and witness it through our own eyes at that very moment in time.
Writing this blog post has made me reflect on how I utilise social media, and how much time I dedicate to it each day, therefore the next post will be a video, which will take into consideration all of the content from previous posts. I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am!
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